Those We Leave Behind
by Faricu
Summary: A short story based on the final moments of Barrin's life.


_Please note that I don't own the characters or locations used in this. They are the property of Wizards of the Coast._

**Those We Leave Behind**

It had been a paradise, once. A place where scholars could work in safety, surrounded by the luxuries they called for. Even when the war began, even when Urza (Oh curse him, curse his name!) activated the thrice-damned device that tore the time stream into shards, it had appeared a tropical paradise unmatched across fair Dominaria.

But now, now everything was gone. Destroyed. Foul Phyrexian abominations surged across blackened flagstones, and once-proud archways crumbled beneath the black and putrid heels of mechanical behemoths. The ocean, once crystalline and beautiful, bubbled and spat forth noxious gases as the poisons of the great beast, Yawgmoth, invaded its once glorious depths.

Yes, once it had been a paradise. Now it was simply another hell.

And through it all, he strode. Barrin, Master of the Academy and last of the humans in this desecrated place. The others were all gone; fled, or fallen beneath the wicked blades of the ungodly machines. They had called for him to leave too, had pleaded for him to join them so that his talents might be put to better use in another place, at another time.

Their words had fallen on deaf ears.

His feet marched resolutely across blasted, melted pathways. His eyes, once cerulean and sparkling with the joys of life, stared half-blindly at the ruins of the academy, the glorious place that had been his home for so many years. The place that had been his family's home. He remembered them – No, that wasn't true. They haunted him, their faces flashing before his eyes and their voices pleading with him, begging him to save them from fates long since sealed.

He remembered Rayne, remembered the wonderful years he had spent with her. Remembered how that had all been cut short when a Phyrexian had driven his blade through her fragile frame, spilling crimson blood across once pristine stones.

And Hannah; he remembered her too. How they'd argued, always so caught up in their own beliefs, their own thoughts. How he'd never managed to say sorry. He hadn't even managed to tell her that he was proud of her before that plague, that damned creation of the great demon, stole her away.

"Damn you," he half-screamed, voice tearing through the grim silence of the advancing Phyrexians, "Urza, Yawgmoth... Damn you both!"

The mechanical monstrosities turned on him as one, advancing steadily toward this single survivor of their foul purge. But Barrin barely cared; all that he had held dear, everything that had mattered to him, had been stolen away by these tainted machines. What did he have to go on for?

Thus it was that he launched himself against them, weaving the mana of the distant mountains into a series of spells; a lance of flame that engulfed the head of the nearest Phyrexian, a blast of celestial flame that turned a second to steaming slag, and a final potent fireball that shattered the metal frames of a dozen more. And then they were upon him. Around him. Above him. Even under him. He couldn't breath, his lungs were filled with the acrid fumes the foul things vented into the air. His eyes, already half-blinded by rage, the pain of loss and the vast torrents of potent mana that flowed through him, were splashed with oil, thick and noxious. And the blades... they were everywhere. He could feel them slicing into his skin, cleaving through flesh and bone even as his blood gushed onto the ruined floor.

But he didn't care. The pain was nothing; a fleeting distraction on his path to oblivion. He could see the next world, the haven that awaited him, and the sweet voices of his wife and daughter reached his ears.

"I am coming, Rayne," he cried as a Phyrexian blade cleaved through his chest, "I'll be there with you soon, Hanna..."

Beneath that mound of Phyrexians, Barrin, master wizard of Tolaria turned his sightless eyes skyward. A smile, faint and ghostly, flickered across his lips. And then his lips parted, mouthing the syllables of the most potent incantation he knew, releasing every spark of mana he had drawn to himself in a single, world-shaking spell.

And then he was gone, engulfed by a searing pillar of flame that drew strength from the very heart of Dominari. That spell, Barrin's requiem for all he had lost and his gift to all he left behind, consumed the demons of Phyrexia too, reducing their twisted forms to scattered atoms even as Tolaria, abandoned and devastated, slipped forever beneath the waves.


End file.
